Computer game idea - Law of One game :)

[Ali Quadir]

well wouldnt be the first lucas product with "real info" in it

Absolutely true Though in this case I figured out they've used an external new age guru that the lead designer happened to know in the brain storming and changed it very very much to make it funny, they felt the original material was too serious. I looked into it later on half hoping that it was inspired by a work of fiction that would entertain me further

It's basically a wink to the new age world of the time that was pretty unknown and inaccessible. No one had internet at the time offcourse.

Hey Carrie,

I do not use raknet, I use only open java software as a base. Raknet is a commercial product it's also C++ based. Ajax won't serve my purpose because it's javascript, while I work in Java. Javascript is limited outside the web browser. And this isn't a web game. I did use it at work. For screens I use the OpenGL library, direct X won't do because I work with Java, direct X would lock me in the MS world. I want the server to run on Linux, and the clients to run practically everywhere. It's a two man team and we're both hooked on linux so that had to be supported to make it interesting to us but we also could not afford beying locked into just linux because it's a small target audience... Mono wasn't strong enough at the time so that left us with only Java... I'd still go with Java if I had to restart from scratch today because I know it by heart and it's fast enough... Due to automatic hotspot optimizations it is at some points paradoxically even faster than C or C++ code would be.

I did use LUA in a previous iteration of the game. But LUA is a script language. If I want to build scripts in Java, I'd write them in Java and offer the user a way of including those class files at runtime. I tried the idea.

What I really needed was an object language much like XML, only XML has the problem of being way too verbose and ugly and terribly slow. I'm not a fan of XML so I went for JSON, and when that did not fill all my needs I simply expanded the definition. I'm not sure if right now it's recognizable as JSON it's certainly not compatible. But it's a very direct method of building in memory graphs of objects. And a rich data structure is essential. I can now send whole code blocks describing behavior or gui to clients. Also the code I use to serialize these blocks of code to network can be used to serialize to disk and in effect "Compile" the code.

Code:

dialog{
   visible=true
   bounds=bounds{x=0;y=512;width=256;height=256}
   content=label{text="Selected = " + selected.name}
}

I could go on for hours about the script language. I've fallen in love with it. It's primary strength is that it allows me to work on the plumbing in Java and write the actual game in the script, "Selected = " + selected.name in the example above will in effect be converted to a expression so even after the dialog runs, if I select another target it will handle all the updates for me. Which is a big time saver considering the amount of dialogs and information is going to go into the final game.

I'm fairly low tech. I use LWJGL (I used to use JOGL), Guice2, OpenAL and I have MySQL support though I'm really leaning towards using the file system as a database. I work with databases in my day to day work and I think they're outdated. I want to go with a disk cacheable Keystore because it has the best scalability imho, but right now all the information is stored in that script language. And it loads in milliseconds so I haven't been motivated to actually build a keystore or find me one.

It's basically aside from a game a testing ground for new techniques I wanted to learn. So the resulting style of working is unfortunately against finishing it very quickly. Fortunately we're having loads of fun. Which is important too

Will you tell me about your project Carrie?